


The Future We Were Making

by lonelywalker



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Age Difference, Background Caitlin/Ronnie, Established Relationship, F/M, Snowells, lying liars who lie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 14:13:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3175748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only blood she could see in the entire room of corpses was Harrison’s. (Spoilers up to 1x09.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Future We Were Making

_“We were making the future,” he said, “and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.” – HG Wells_

She hadn’t seen so many bodies since the accident. Outfitted in SWAT uniforms they barely even seemed like people, crumpled on the floor. But she’d heard them talking earlier: quiet conversation among the strategic plans. They were men beneath the masks, with wives and children expecting them to come home for Christmas. She would have knelt beside them immediately, but Detective Thawne, on his cellphone, caught her eye and shook his head. Nothing she could do. 

Beside her, Cisco was frozen in place. As if seeing Ronnie hadn’t been enough of a shock. “Get my med kit,” she told him, half just to get him out of there, and he scrambled to do it.

The only blood she could see in this entire room of corpses was Harrison’s.

Detective West was with him in their makeshift cage, sitting him up, talking to him. Without being able to see anything over their security monitors, she’d prepared herself for the worst. She’d done that long ago too, when they’d pulled him out of the wreckage, his back broken. But Harrison Wells was made of sterner stuff. She should’ve known that by now.

“Did he pass out?” she asked Joe, crouching beside them, looking beyond the streaked blood on Harrison’s face to see what the actual damage might be.

“I don’t think so. But that thing… the man in the yellow suit… he tossed him around like a ragdoll.”

Harrison’s eyes seemed focused, despite everything. She pulled out a flashlight from her coat. He winced. “I’m fine.”

He’d said the same thing from his hospital bed, bound up in bandages, being fed morphine, knowing he’d never walk again. Without the defenses of his chair or glasses, he seemed even more vulnerable. 

“You’re a mess.”

He coughed. Smiled. “You should see the other guy.”

Caitlin smiled back and braced an arm around him. It took actual effort to avoid trailing her fingers through his hair, the way she had the last time they were this close. “I’ve got him,” she told Joe. “You probably have other things to do.”

Joe probably did, but who knew what they were? Detective Thawne seemed shocked to the core, and what would they report back? That a man with superspeed had killed all these people and stolen priceless technology? But that was their problem for now. She had to focus on her patient. “What’s your name?” she asked.

There was a pause she didn’t like. “Harrison Wells.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“S.T.A.R. Labs.” He coughed again. “Central City.”

She asked him to spell a word or two backwards while she inspected the lacerations on his face. Nothing broken. Nothing too serious, although it looked dramatic. And then there were the ribs he was holding. Bruised, maybe broken, his breathing shallow and strained. The right side of his shirt was torn and wet with blood. She peeled it away to look. “You’re going to need stitches.”

“I imagine I’ll have some trouble walking, too.”

“I’m sure Joe already called for an ambulance.”

“No.” He caught her hand in his, tight enough to hurt. “No ambulances.”

There might have been actual fear in his eyes, like she hadn’t even seen the night Farooq broke into the lab and was _this_ close to killing them all. She glanced back down at his side. “Well… I could do it. We have plenty of equipment upstairs.”

She was patching up Barry on a regular basis: why not him too? Over the past year she’d just become used to the idea that he wouldn’t let her be his doctor, wouldn’t let her _ask_ him anything about his health, let alone examine him.

“What happened with the… the other Flash?” he asked, just as she was looking at his ripped-up pants and wondering what damage might be there that he couldn’t even feel.

“He’s gone. He…” There was too much to say. Too much to put into words. “Ronnie scared him off.”

Harrison blinked at her. “Ronnie? Our Ronnie?”

 _Our Ronnie_. Ronnie’s death had left a wide-open gash in all their lives. She’d never been alone in experiencing that, although hers was deeper, wider, infinite.

“He’s alive somehow. But he’s not the same.” Were any of them? Barry liked to say they’d all been struck by lightning that night, without even realizing what that meant for people who hadn’t been gifted with incredible powers. “I’ll explain later. We need to get you cleaned up.” 

Cisco had appeared with her kit and was making his way over while trying not to look at the bodies. And there was Barry too, back in civilian clothes, looking a little beat up and shellshocked, his CSI bag over one shoulder as he talked with Joe.

“I’m so sorry,” Cisco started immediately. “I don’t know what happened with the forcefield. I’m going to run a dozen diagnostics right away…”

There were a lot of questions about what exactly had happened in the last half hour, and she suspected she’d get the answers to precisely none of them this evening. “Cisco, find his glasses. And ask Barry to come over here.”

Harrison was still grasping her hand. “Cait…”

“Try to be a good patient for once, would you?” This was the only kind of situation in which she’d ever give him orders, but it was the kind of situation where she had to.

Barry and Cisco lifted him to his chair, which was the kind of public display of weakness Harrison found utterly shameful. He somehow managed everything else on his own, managed to dress and shower and navigate through his life without one gesture of assistance. Just a couple of weeks ago, she and Cisco had needed to help him back into his chair after he’d been blasted by Farooq. Harrison had barely said a word to them afterward.

Up in the lab she let him lift himself up onto the bed and take off his shirt. A scan showed no broken bones, no injured organs. Scrapes and bruises. Once she’d washed off his face he looked a lot less horrific. More like he’d been in a bar fight than attacked by a metahuman.

“He didn’t want to kill me,” Harrison said. “He only wanted out of our trap.”

“But the police officers…”

“I don’t know.” His voice was soft, his breathing still shallow. “Very little has made sense tonight.”

There was no anesthetic while she gave him the stitches – he wouldn’t allow it, simply clenched his fist and talked to Cisco while she worked. He’d had bad experiences in the hospital, she knew, and she wasn’t about to question him on it, not if it wasn’t medically necessary.

An hour later, Joe appeared, weary and not very willing to talk once he was sure Harrison was all right. What could be said? “We’re having a small party later,” he told them. “I know it seems crazy after the night we’ve all had, but Iris is expecting us, and-”

“After a night like this, it’s the best thing for you,” Harrison said.

“My thoughts exactly. So you’re all invited, of course. Just some music, eggnog, good company…”

Cisco brightened, his guilt forgotten. “Eggnog!”

Once Joe had gone and Cisco had darted out to check into more ways to lock down the lab, Harrison cleared his throat. “Please pass on my apologies to Joe and Iris. I don’t think I’m in much shape for a social gathering tonight.”

“I’ll stay with you.”

“No. You deserve a break. When was the last time you had some fun, Caitlin?”

She raised her eyebrows. “When was the last time you did, Dr. Wells?”

“On another night I promise you I would have. But I ache in places I didn’t think I could feel anymore.”

“Then I’m staying with you. You might not have passed out, but you still have a concussion. You shouldn’t be alone.”

Harrison lifted a hand to indicate the lab. “I’m surrounded by hi-tech medical and security equipment. I’m hardly alone. Go to the party. Relax.”

She fingered the phone in her pocket. Gathering around a tree with friends _did_ seem like something she needed, if only to stop her from fixating on Ronnie all night. “Text me every half hour,” she said. “Or I’m sending Barry to check up on you.”

“Every half hour,” he agreed. “Have fun.”

Harrison kept his word. She could sit on the Wests’ couch and sip eggnog and listen to Iris talk about the crazy antics of her department’s professors, and every half hour, down to the minute, her phone would shiver with something new: Harrison’s best wishes to all of them, his musings on the current cleanliness of the lab ceilings, his search for a clean sweatshirt: “Barry seems to find them so easily.”

She could imagine him there, safe, alive, if a little disgruntled. Then, at eleven, while Eddie Thawne was on his feet reenacting the time he had to arrest Santa Claus, a new message came in: “Going home. H.”

It wasn’t an invitation. He was checking in. He was making sure she didn’t go back to the lab to look for him. Not everything between them had to be about whatever had been going on between them for a while now. It was something nebulous, something undefined, that barely even existed at work, yet sometimes coalesced into intense, passionate nights spent in his arms.

Iris touched her elbow. “Everything okay?”

“Oh sure.” She cleared the message from her screen. “But I really should be going.”

She and Cisco shared a cab, dropping him off first before she gave the driver Harrison’s address. The nights she wound up there were rarely planned, but he was almost always expecting her when she did. And that, given that there were plenty of nights he never went home at all, was a suggestion they were on something like the same wavelength.

He’d given her a key back in the bad days after the accident, when he was still healing, still wounded and ashamed. She’d gone not as his doctor, but to keep him company, to talk to him about things that weren’t disasters and dead friends.

“Harrison?” She knocked on the inside of the door once it was already open.

“In here.”

He was lying on his couch reading in dim lamplight, the white gauze she’d taped to his side thankfully not soaked through with blood. Or it had been and he’d changed it himself. He rested the book on his bare chest and looked up at her standing over him. “How was the party?”

“Fun. You’ll have to come to the next one.”

“I was never exactly the life and soul of them.”

She let her fingers brush against his hair, which was still wildly spiked. “You don’t have to be. Although the Wests’ house does have a lot of stairs.”

Harrison smiled. “Ah, stairs. My mortal enemy.” He closed his eyes and placed his glasses on the book. “Are you staying?”

“I could…” She perched awkwardly on the edge of his never-used coffee table. “I understand things are different now we know Ronnie’s alive. But it doesn’t mean things have to change between us.”

“Of course it does. If this is really Ronnie, our Ronnie, then he’s your fiancé. Without the accident, you would have been married by now, having children together… Perhaps you still can.”

Perhaps. She’d spent the last year living out so many _perhaps_ daydreams, ways Ronnie might have survived, ways he would suddenly appear and everything would be all right again. But Ronnie had been dead and Harrison had helped her stay alive.

“That doesn’t change how I feel about you.” She didn’t like his eyes being closed. It was impossible to read him at the best of times. She took a leap: “Or how you feel about me.”

He seemed a little less black-and-blue than he had when she’d left him, his face less swollen. But maybe that was just the light. His hand took hers. “We’ll figure it all out,” he said, his voice just above a whisper. “But not tonight.”

Most of the time his disability didn’t affect her at all, but what it did do was put the ball firmly in her court. He _couldn’t_ just kiss her the way she’d have liked to be kissed once in a while if he’d had the use of his legs – just gathered up in his arms and kissed without any need for prior discussion. But the decision now was far too plainly hers.

What do you do when your fiancé comes back from the dead? When you’re sleeping with your boss? When your lover has come close to death in the past few hours? You go home alone and get some sleep and make no decisions while weary and scared, after several rounds of eggnog. But she leaned over and smoothed back his hair and kissed him, and all of it dropped away. There was only his mouth on hers, his arms around her. His lip was split and sore, and she tried not to be anything but gentle, yet he kissed her like he had the very first time, when they’d both been needy and desperate beyond any hope of restraint.

“We can’t,” she said, half-hoping he’d argue with her. “Not now. I just stitched you back together.”

Harrison smiled. “Precisely what were you planning to do to me, Dr. Snow?”

“Not let you bleed all over your expensive sheets.” She kissed him again and sat back. “But I’ll stay, if you like.” Even if she had to sleep on the couch, it was better than a solitary cab ride back home, worrying about him all night long. “You shouldn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time.”

He scratched at the butterfly stitch over his eyebrow. “That seems entirely unnecessary.”

“You know, you spend so much time warning Barry to be careful, and then you do exactly the same things as him.”

“I don’t know… I haven’t done much running lately.” Harrison opened his eyes. “But yes, I would like you to stay.”

She went to bed first, letting him move around without being watched. His sheets really were expensive, or she assumed they were from the way they felt. She’d never been able to splash out like that herself. They were clean and crisp, but how often did he ever go to bed? Before the accident, when there were more than enough staff members at S.T.A.R. Labs to watch and gossip, she knew he’d be there around the clock, catching naps at his desk, on couches and cots. Now that there were only three of them, who knew what he did?

Caitlin fiddled with her phone, sending Cisco a text to tell him she’d made it home, and then setting the alarm. Two hours. Her sleep cycle would be so messed up in the morning. Maybe she could convince Harrison to come with her to Jitters. They could get some coffee like normal people. He could thank Iris for the invitation like a normal person. But she knew even now that he’d have some excuse.

“I place my life in your hands,” Harrison said as she felt him slip under the covers with her. “As always.”

She wanted to hold him, to lay her head on his shoulder, but he was bruised and bandaged, and it wasn’t such a good idea. “You’re going to be fine. None of it’s serious.”

“It feels serious when more than half of me doesn’t work properly.” A sigh. “But you’re right, as you often are. Everything improves slowly. The future is a brighter one.”

It was hard to tell if he actually drifted off, but she was too tired to stay awake. A long, long day plus several drinks and Harrison’s warmth next to her soon faded into a sleep without dreams… And then her alarm was beeping urgently by her ear.

The plan was to check if Harrison was still easy to rouse and lucid, but he switched off the alarm before she did, and then his mouth was on hers again: insistent, urgent, his body pressed up against her. “Hey,” she said, putting her arms around him, still half asleep. “You okay?”

Agitation, behavioral changes… Those were things to look out for. She wasn’t sure which category this fell into.

“I’m fine,” he said, his voice muffled by the way he was nuzzling her neck. “And I’m here, if you want me.”

She wanted him. It was wrong, stupid, but she wanted his weight on her, his clever hands, his _mouth_ , God. If Harrison couldn’t use his legs, couldn’t just take her like Ronnie had, he more than made up for it in other ways. Ever since they’d begun these liaisons of theirs, he’d been giving her body back to her, remaking her into something that didn’t simply exist, but _felt_. It was all she’d ever wanted, her fingers curled tightly in his hair as he made love to her. 

She must have knocked painfully into his bruises as they kissed, but he only whispered her name and held her closer. Harrison… His eyes might have glowed in the dark, shot through with moonlight. She settled against his hips, let him slide home. He was so warm, so hard inside her that it didn’t matter that she had to do all the moving. He held and kissed her, his hand working down between them until her body stuttered and he closed his eyes tightly, and she knew what lightning felt like from the inside out.

Never had she seen him so relaxed, so simply happy, than he was after sex. Not that it lasted, it never did, but for a while the tension inside him dissipated, or barriers fell.

“You could wait a long time, looking for the real Harrison Wells,” he said when she told him this. “And how would you know him if you found him?”

“I know him already.” She curled close to him out of habit, his bandages scratching her belly. “I know you. We come from the same place, don’t we?”

Prodigious talent, heartwrenching loss. Harrison wrapped an arm around her and pulled the blanket up over them both. “We come from very different places, Caitlin. But we can at least continue the journey together.”

She closed her eyes as she breathed in the scent of him: sweat and alcohol and the blood crusted in his hair. Not one thought of hers came close to resetting her alarm.

It was mid-morning by the time she woke. Usually at this hour she’d be at work in the lab, Cisco brave enough to turn on the radio while Harrison was busy elsewhere. Harrison had never prohibited music, had never said a thing about it, but Cisco always leaped for the off switch when he came into the room. Forever their teacher, their elder, their boss.

He wasn’t there next to her in bed: a good sign, if he was awake and moving around. She stretched out, unwilling to leave warm blankets yet, a hand drifting down her body as though she could still feel his fingerprints on her skin.

Harrison was right. In a better, less cruel world, she and Ronnie would be married, happy, trying for a baby. Maybe that could still become a reality, if he was still in there, if she could find him and bring him home. But she'd imagined happiness with Harrison too in the last few months, coaxing him out from his own darkness and pain. They were girlish fantasies, all of those wedding days, honeymoons, happy endings. All she ever really had was here and now.

“Good morning,” Harrison said, appearing at the door in his chair. “There’s breakfast.”

Had either of them eaten anything last night? Nothing except fruitcake. Maybe he’d raided Cisco’s snack hoard. But she wasn’t much in the mood to get up. “Or you could come back to bed.”

“I have some work to do at the lab.” He’d showered, shaved, and dressed: one of his gray sweaters instead of the black, which she always took as an optimistic sign. His face looked better in daylight too. “Someone needs to tell Tina we’ve misplaced her prototype. And Cisco’s already sent me five messages about unexplained power surges.”

“Or,” she said, “you could come back to bed.”

He smiled and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Perhaps you’d let me take you to dinner tonight.”

This was new. “Dinner. At a restaurant?”

He’d taken her once before, years ago, when he’d first been tempting her to tie her future to S.T.A.R. Labs. She hadn’t needed the dinner to be convinced, but it had given her a thrill sitting opposite this dashing older man, sipping wine, letting herself fantasize about a thrilling nighttime tryst. She’d been more than a little disappointed that he hadn’t tried his luck back then.

“You’ll have to suffer through being seen with a pariah, and I may have drinks thrown in my face, not to mention vitriol…”

“I'd love to,” she said quickly, before he could think better of the entire offer. Going out would be good for him, as well as whatever they were together. He might even wear one of his old suits. But being together in public had other implications. “What about Cisco?”

Harrison raised his eyebrows. “I’ll schedule my romantic dinner with him some other time.”

“I mean… Should we tell him about this? About us?” She could already imagine his wide eyes and sly grin, as well as the innuendo he’d spout to Barry as soon as both of them were out of earshot. But it would be a mature decision, a way forward, a step out of the darkness.

But only a flash of amusement crossed Harrison’s face. “One should always keep a few secrets, Caitlin," he said.

And then he was gone.


End file.
